Yuelin Xiong

Solar cells commonly rely on metal contacts primarily composed of screen-printed silver, and some designs also necessitate a transparent conducting film of indium tin oxide. The ongoing trend to reduce the price of solar panels requires the shift towards metallisation schemes that remove the use of such expensive, nonabundant and non-sustainable materials. My project aims to explore novel metal to device contacts and new technologies will be proposed to achieve low-cost manufacturing of efficient metallisation for single and multijunction solar cells. Analytical and electrical characterisation will be used to assess the metal/semiconductor interface and the performance of the metallisation, including atom probe tomography, electron microscopy and mass-spectrometry. The understanding and development from this project will result in improved manufacturing of commercial solar panels, which in turn will help mitigate the devastating consequences of climate change. My supervisors are Prof Sebastian Bonilla from the Electronic and Interface Materials Laboratory and Prof Michael Moody from the APT Group.